Beasts

Joyce Carol Oates

It is simply impossible for a single human being to turn out the work she has over the course of her career, consistently stratospheric in both quality and quantity. Her thirty-year bibliography is so vast that the major internet repository of Oates research and criticism doesn't have a full list anywhere, but is now a searchable database. Another admittedly incomplete bibliography on the web lists eighty-nine books split between novels, short story collections, and poetry, fifteen anthologies she has edited or co-edited, ten works of non-fiction, and ninety anthologies in which her work has appeared since 1980 (and those are only the horror-themed anthologies). She is the Merzbow of literature, the Sun Ra of wordcraft, both the dream and the nightmare of the bibliophile with a limited reserve of cash. The truly astounding part of all this is that one can walk into a (very well-stocked) bookshop, pick up a Joyce Carol Oates book at random, and have an odds- on chance of being rewarded with one of his finest reads of the year. Now add to this idea the fact that Oates is, for all intents and purposes, a one-trick pony, and explain how one person can write so much material on a single theme and still have it come out so very, very well.

Such is certainly the case with her recent novel Beasts. Anyone who's read Oates before, in whatever form, is liable to know a few things about this book even before cracking the cover: the main theme of the book will be human degradation. One of the characters in the book will be horrified by the degradation, even while experiencing it, and this horror will cause the character to commit some sort of extreme and socially unacceptable act. There will be a great deal of uncomfortable eroticism. Then you open the book, read the first two small chapters, and here's something new: Oates is going to tell you all this in the first four pages. It's almost as if she's throwing down the gauntlet to the reader; “you know it's coming, I know it's coming, let's see how much I can give you at the beginning and still beguile you with my novel.”

And utterly beguiling it is. Gillian Brauer is a student at a small college in Massachusetts who is enamored of one of her professors. She is not alone in this, but the lengths to which she goes in her obsession with him are rather farther than the others go (in one early scene, she surreptitiously follows his wife through town, and mentions she has done this a number of times before). She knows that sometimes the professor and his wife, a sculptor whose most recent show at the school's gallery has ignited a firestorm of outrage, will sometimes allow students into their inner circle, but that these students are very tight-lipped about what goes on there. Secret society stuff at its best. Gillian, too shy to confess her love for her professor and desire to be one of those students, begins to imagine that all of her housemates in the small house/dormitory where they live, are members of the inner circle, and eventually gets to the point where she must either confront her professor or go crazy.

And that's the light, optimistic part of the novel. Things get much more fun after the confrontation.

This novel is obsessed with small. It is slim—a hundred thirty pages in the hardback edition. Gillian lives in the smallest dorm on campus and is obsessed with gaining entrance into living quarters with even fewer people. Her obsession grows when, after a semester with the professor in a normal-sized lecture class, she is admitted to one of his workshops, with only eleven students. Her classmates grow thinner over time. Small is everywhere. There is a whole (probably longer than the book itself) thesis to be written on small in here. The themes Oates taken on, on the other hand, are not small in the least, as they never are. And, as always, she does so with such style that the reader cannot help be compelled. I didn't finish this book in one sitting only because I had to go to bed last night if I wanted to have a fresh enough mind in the morning to keep involved with the story.

Gillian's professor is fond of muttering Nietzsche under his breath at odd times. Funny that Nietzsche's most famous aphorism is never mentioned in the book: “…and if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” Oates has been gazing into this particular abyss for thirty years now, throwing down that gauntlet, challenging it to gaze back, and reporting on what she finds. Perhaps she will continue to do so for another thirty years, and we will continue to get such brilliant books as this.